Shark attacks off
Australia’s coastline happen frequently; victims perish or get away with
horrific injuries. Are sharks the greatest threat to divers? Or stingrays, like
the one that killed experienced naturalist Steve Irwin? What about the marine
stingers that prowl the tropical seas, mainly from October to April? Like the
box jellyfish, also called sea wasp, whose venom is so painful that victims may
lose consciousness and drown or die of heart failure. Perhaps all these are
threats – but, I believe, ignoring the principles of safe diving can be even
more fatal. Failure to keep the airway open upon ascent may lead to air
embolism, emphysema or pneumothorax (lung collapse). Surfacing too fast causes
decompression sickness, the so-called bends, when the nitrogen dissolved in the
blood begins to boil.

Summarised in a
nutshell, this all sounds dreadful, but can be avoided by being well prepared.
Having obtained my diver’s license from Scuba Schools International (SSI) five
years ago with hardly any diving since, I enlisted in a refresher course at home
in New Zealand, before booking a diving holiday on the “Anaconda”, a boat
sailing from Airlie Beach to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.

As the Virgin Blue
airplane was spinning its way down to the green flats surrounding Proserpine,
the “Gateway to the Whitsundays”, I scanned the horizon for the blue shimmer of
the sea. There was nothing that would herald the famous North Queensland coast.
Proserpine sulks in the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed to me, and the
shuttle I boarded for Airlie Beach took about half an hour to get there –
driving fast.

I was ill prepared
for what awaited me at the designated contact point for my diving party. This
turned out to be a travel agency where nobody from the sailing-diving firm was
in attendance, just under-informed girls who doubted my online booking printout
showing the amount still owing. I had to pay more. This was particularly
galling, since there were now cheap specials on offer for this very trip. The
agent I had dealt with by phone and e-mail from New Zealand proved to be
unavailable and his agency had moved from the given address.

“You must not take
bags with zips on board”, I learnt as an added surprise.

“Why?”

“Because bedbugs hide
in them”.

At that stage I was
already considering to abandon both deposit and trip. Sensing my mood, the young
woman dealing with me relented her officious mien and let me have two carry bags
from her stock – free of charge. Then she gave me a voucher for storing the rest
of my belongings – also for free. These were small friendly gestures, but
sometimes such minor favours make a big difference, as indeed in this situation.
However, the only place where I could change and repack, were the public
toilets. A representative of the sail-dive firm would not emerge before 6:45 PM
at the point of embarkation. That much for the customer service of a costly,
allegedly up market trip. “Awesome comfort”, it says in the brochure.

Murky Whitsunday Islands

Clutching the rented “stinger suits”, we
made our way to the pitch black torso of the Anaconda, her three masts almost
imperceptibly swaying about a starless sky. Stinger suits are thin wetsuits that
have become mandatory on some, if not all, commercial snorkeling or diving
trips, whether in the warm season, when marine stingers appear, or beyond it
like in June, the time of our trip. They turned out to be essential to keep us
warm in the 23 degree water. Such a temperature may be warm enough for sport
swimming, but drains the body heat of a diver floating under water with minimal
movement.

I donned my suit
already on board, before the rubber runabouts took us to Whitehaven Beach of
Whitsunday Island, where the Anaconda had cast her anchor late at night.

Under a grey sky
mirrored lead like by the water Whitehaven Beach presented an aura very
different from the image stored in my mind from my last visit. Then the white
silica sand of the expansive crescent glittered in the sun under a brilliantly
blue sky. Now, it should again have been a special treat to spend the morning on
the allegedly second most beautiful beach in the world, with swimming and
snorkeling in the pleasant waves lapping it. Harry and Justin, our diving guides
and instructors divided us into groups to test and practice basic diving skills
near the beach. Those not involved kicked balls around, had short swims or tried
to harvest super brief tanning sessions out of the sun stingy sky. I admired
some girls not only for their shapely bodies but also for their brave shivering
in skimpy bikinis.

On board the Anaconda
were certified divers like me and “students”. Everybody had to show or learn how
to let water fill the mask and clear it under water by blowing air in from the
“BC”, short for the “Buoyancy Control” vest. The other skill entailed taking the
(breathing) regulator out of the mouth, letting it go, finding it again,
clearing it from water and continue breathing through it, all while submerged,
of course. Those who could do it would be allowed to dive. Some gave up the idea
of scuba diving at this stage.

After lunch the
Anaconda made for Hooke Island. I opted for the first dive
with our guide Harry and together with Pere and Marta, a brother and sister.
They were good-looking dark skinned Catalonians (not Spaniards, God forbid!).
Pere was a strong stocky guy with close cropped dark hair, Marta with dark brown
long wavy hair and a voluptuous figure. Despite their young ages, Pere perhaps
20 and Marta apparently two years older, they were experienced divers with more
than 100 dives to their credit. I was very excited about exploring the
underwater world that I had seen from above snorkeling on my previous visit.
Alas, the water was rather murky, the coral colours dulled by the lack of
sunshine and I missed the abundance of fish big and small that I had been
looking forward to. My Catalonian mates who were used to diving in the
Mediterranean Sea, however, were much more enthused.

The Great Barrier
Reef

Our skipper started the motor just after 4 AM cutting short my sleep and
probably that of others. He aimed at getting us to the Reef in time for the
usual breakfast at 7 AM. It was not only a noisy but also a bumpy ride. I,
occupying the top bunk, was nearly tipped out at an exceptionally violent
moment.

Immediately after breakfast I got ready for diving with Harry and my Catalonian
friends. I felt comfortable in their company. I found this particularly
important, because our diving procedures seemed to be somewhat light on safety.
Our instructors filled all cylinders after every dive from the on-board
compressor and tested them, albeit too cursorily. This became obvious to me when
I did my own checks and was unable to get pressure into the buoyancy control
system, the “BC”. When I demonstrated this to Harry, he discovered that a wrong
O-ring had been inserted into the cylinder valve. Despite its tiny size and
modest appearance, this small rubber ring provides the essential seal between
the cylinder and the first-stage yoke. Replacing the O-ring was not enough. The
“spider-like” assembly of regulators, inflators and gauges was leaking as well
and had to be replaced.

When I had trained for my SSI license, much emphasis had been placed on a number
of inspections that “diving buddies” had to go through prior to every dive,
checking each other, including rehearsing hand signals, “lost buddy” and
emergency procedures. While all of this might have been a little “over the top”
in our undertakings where we dived in small groups staying close together, it
would still have been important for the instructors to thoroughly check all
equipment and insist on each diver double checking. A problem with the hand
signals would lead later on to some unfortunate consequences for myself...

With weight belts and diving equipment put on and adjusted, we clambered down
the steps leading from the stern of the ship to the runabout bobbing in the
waves. A chilly wind fell from the glum sky that drew cloud curtains quickly
over any cheeky bursts of sunlight. We were at the northern end of the Great
Barrier Reef. I was again excited about the underwater world hidden beneath the
heaving rippled dusky surface. Having arrived at a place called Bait Reef, Harry
counted to three and, holding on to our masks, gauges and weight belts we made a
backward roll into the water.

Washed by the Coral Sea, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest single
living structure made by billions of tiny organisms, the
coralpolyps. Comprising close to 3000 individual reefs,
900 islands and stretching over 3,000 kilometres with an area of more than
340,000 square kilometres it is so huge that it is clearly discernable from
outer space. It supports a wide diversity of life and has become a World
Heritage site. A large part of the reef is protected by the Great Barrier Marine
Park which is supposed to limit the impact of human use, such as overfishing and
tourism. Environmental pressures to the reef and its
ecosystem include also effluents, climate change
causing
coral bleaching, and outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns
starfish. The Reef has long been culturally and spiritually important to the
Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.

Slowly we descended into the murky depths of blossoming coral mounds and cliffs.
Hard corals threatened with gnarled limbs and soft ones fanned in the current.
Fish of various sizes, shapes and colours glanced at us, flicking in and out of
hide outs, appearing and disappearing around corners. Deeper down the abyss
blotted itself out in impenetrable lightlessness.

Although I looked in awe at the alien landscape, again I felt a tinge of
disillusionment, missing the much greater variety of colours and marine life
that I remembered from my snorkeling holiday twenty years ago.

Skirting the Reef

While the Anaconda was
motoring towards our second diving spot of the day, the Hardy Reef, I went to
sleep to make up for the short night before. Shouting on deck woke me up. Our
ship was passing a gap in the reef with a veritable waterfall gushing through
it, obviously caused by tide reversal. The top parts of the reef were now
visible as an enormous crescent that extended as far as we could see, fading
into the horizon.

The afternoon dive was a so-called “wall dive”. Instead of following the
undulating marine landscape, we floated along a steep coral drop, inspecting it
and the life it harboured by floating up and down, depending on the unfolding
panorama. What I thought were angel fish of different colours were passing by
elegantly. A shark that might have measured two metres in length prowled below
us minding its business.

It
is said that sharks don’t consider humans as food, but they are curious and may
have a go at sampling these uncommon apparitions. Unfortunately for us, the
sharks’ teeth are not only extremely sharp but also point inwards, so that even
a “friendly” bite can leave a limb in the shark’s mouth. Gushing blood may then
entice the shark to continue munching and also may attract additional sharks,
because they may detect as little as one part per million of blood in sea water.
Just at the time of my diving trip I found a picture of a surfer in the
newspaper. He had survived a shark attack that left him with an amputated arm.
He claimed he was still keen to carry on his surfing hobby. I rather confront a
shark under water, where I can see it and fend it off by punching its nose.
Allegedly, this works.

Ascending, I misread Harry’s signal to mean going up to the surface straight
away, since we had been floating not much deeper than 5 metres for the last few
minutes anyway. Alas, I had skipped the safety stop that is mandatory for three
minutes at a depth of four to five metres. Harry gesticulated to me frantically
to descend again, even attempting to pull me down. Too late! I already had
filled my BC with too much air and tried incompetently to get rid of it. Back on
board, Pere reprimanded me forcefully:

“There is no excuse for omitting the safety stop. It’s a matter of principle,
because without it you risk your health and may even die. It’s your
responsibility to make that stop, never mind what somebody else tells you or you
think he told you!”

Not only was I embarrassed, I also had lost confidence in myself and in our
guide. It was then that I decided against going on the night dive that was
supposed not to be missed.

A Risky and a Flawless Dive

A
brisk morning wind had not only swept the clouds from the sun, but also allowed
the Anaconda to sail happily to Hayman Island, the last but one destination of
our voyage. The ship’s deck became littered with sunbathing bodies.

My
cabin mate Martin, a young German, had been on the night dive. So I asked him
about his impressions. He called it a unique experience, but soon confessed that
he had been in trouble. While descending, water had penetrated into his mask and
he had found clearing it difficult. Apart from that, he had been unable to
equalise properly, so that his ears ached. Usual practice is to ascend to a
level of lower pressure and restart equalising. However, he had not been able to
do this in order not be left behind. He described diving down like entering a
vertical tube defined by the beam of the torch. At the bottom his group had been
swimming through a tunnel-like passage when he had noticed that his BC still
contained too much air pinning him to the ceiling. He had been able to free
himself, but admitted to having been scared. However, having reached the target,
a turtle nesting place, he had appreciated the awesome spectacle of large and
small turtles floating in and out of his torch’s beam.

His adventure could obviously have had much worse results than aching ears for
several hours afterwards. Not allowing a fellow diver, particularly a learner,
enough time to get organised, is indefensible and I found my decision to
postpone novel ventures to a time when I would be more experienced justified.

When we arrived at the Blue Pearl Cove of Hayman Island, just about everybody
had had enough of diving and turned to snorkeling. I wanted to finish with a
flawless dive, particularly since the sea bathed in sunlight, and chose to
follow Justin. With us came only another person, a young Canadian girl.

It
was like visiting a beautiful well-kept garden. Sunbeams kissed the corals and
awakened their colours. We followed the contours of the underwater world,
perhaps not deeper than ten metres, and I relished my newly acquired skill of
rising and dipping by using just my breath and the appropriate flipper action.
Gone were the times when I was letting air in and out of my BC to achieve the
same, thus wasting much of my air supply. Justin had filled a water bottle with
crumbled bread that he released once we had crouched together on the sea floor.
Little fish snapped up the morsels right in front of our masks. However, as on
the previous dives, we encountered only a limited variety of the finned
denizens. Justin discovered a dainty starfish which he passed to us and a moray
eel poked its angry head out of its hide-out. Ascending proceeded this time
according to good practice.

Back on board a message waited for me: the travel agency that had overcharged me
had been able to contact my on-line agent and now asked me to pick up a refund!

A Fun Party With A Scary Ending

I checked in to a
pleasant hostel, had a good clean-up, satisfied my hunger with a large pizza and
was looking forward to a relaxing night. Destiny wanted it otherwise. When I was
sitting on a street bench licking a whopping ice-cream as a desert, Kim, the
Korean girl I had been friendly with, strode across the road, happy to see me.
After the Anaconda had docked in the marina we had all been busy disembarking
and had disappeared in all directions without much of a good-bye.

Kim looked pale and
her usually free flowing long black hair was hanging limply about her face.
Distressed, she told me that she couldn’t pay for her dives because her credit
card would not accept the code she believed she remembered. Worse, not having
access to her money brought the remainder of her trip into jeopardy. Her bank
had told her she would have to return to Korea for a new code. Now she was
ringing friends and family to help her solve this problem.

“I’ve got to keep
phoning,” she said, intrepidly, “but let’s go to the boat party together.”

“What party?”

“Don’t you know, we
are all supposed to meet up in the Phoenix Club?”

This I had missed and
was unprepared for. I was wearing only a skimpy tank top, short jeans and
sandals.

The club was crowded,
very loud, thronged with people not only from our boat but also from others that
finished their voyages on that Monday. A guy at the back of the disco area was
playing the guitar and singing, but nobody seemed to take any notice of him.
Drinks were served at a discount and waitresses dished out free pizza that I was
unable to eat, being still full of ice-cream. Successively, our friends turned
up. Most girls had made themselves up so beautifully I had to look twice to
recognise them. Conversations were conducted by shouting into each others ears,
because of the background noise, but the atmosphere was definitely convivial. It
was all one happy crowd, so that I met also guys and girls of the other boats.

The disco floor
stayed empty until a racy woman with long blond hair and in a black-and-gold
pantsuit, apparently young mid-age, took to the floor, dancing energetically in
front of the entertainer. When I passed, she got me to dance with her. Then she
asked whether I thought she was a female.

“You look like one,”
I replied sheepishly.

“Are you gay?”

“No, why should I?””

“Why not?”

I began to feel
uneasy and distanced myself with the excuse to rejoin my friends.

Many people had their
little digital cameras with them, as had I, and we took photos of each other,
hugging each other or making fun. While circulating between friends, a group of
Irish girls snatched me, commenting on the lovely green of my tank top (Irish
green?) and agreed it went well with my brown skin. I also explained the
symbolic meaning of my peka-peka greenstone necklace, the only item embellishing
my minimal clothing. This obviously didn’t matter. On the contrary, I “was
looking cool” (literally). A group of five girls dragged me away to the dance
floor. As we danced, others joined us until the disco space was crowded. It
almost looked like we had started the skipping, hopping and swinging.

One of our Canadian
mates borrowed the entertainer’s guitar, played it and sang, amazingly well.
Pity, he could not show his talents on board! There were more hugs and photos,
particularly with giant sunglasses that made the round, more dancing. I can’t
remember ever having been asked or made to dance by so many pretty girls. One
girl wanted to know whether I was on face book, another ran her finger down my
naked arm and pretended to lick it, indicating: “yum”!

It’s interesting how
youthful behaviour and a good mood assisted by the semi-darkness of the room may
conceal age differences.

Then something
happened for which I was totally unprepared. I had just handed over my camera to
somebody for a photo of myself and a girl I was with, when a woman that looked
deceptively more serious than everybody else, passed by grasping the camera.
First I believed she wanted to take a photo of us herself or of a friend of
hers, but she disappeared in the crowd claiming she had recovered her property.
I tried to pursue her but some guys blocked me demanding that I leave her alone.
I pleaded with them, that this was my own digital camera with my holiday photos
in it – to no avail. They looked as if they’d rather pick a fight than persuade
their friend to check out the recorded photos. Obviously, these people were too
inebriated to be open to reasoning.

All of a sudden, a
pretty blonde appeared with my camera; she had been able to get the befuddled
woman to look at the pictures taken. I profusely thanked the girl and we danced,
but my party spirit was broken and I took this incident as the signal to leave.

Decompressing On
Daydream Island

Flying after diving can harm a diver whose
blood still contains excessive nitrogen, because the pressure in airplane cabins
is much lower than at sea level. It is recommended to postpone flying for at
least eighteen hours. I decided to “decompress” on Daydream Island which lies
closest to Airlie Beach and is quiet in early winter.

There are two resorts
on the island, the older one at the southern end, the newer one in the North
where most of the ferries now dock. The resorts are connected by a board walk
skirting the eastern shore and by a forest track leading over the wooded hills
in the West. It was pleasant to roam about almost on my own. The new hotel is
tastefully laid out; the entrance hall decorated with large fish replicas
hanging from the high ceiling. In front of it, an artificial lagoon boasts a
variety of fish whose feeding I was lucky enough to watch. A rounded pool with
clear water invites swimmers. Sculptures of three mermaids grace a rocky finger
jutting out from the sandy beach.

The story goes that
mermaids warned Cook in 1770 when he was about to run aground in the passage
between South Molle and the neighbouring island. Did he spot dugongs which may
look like human figures with fins?

I climbed up the path
through rain forest to reach the southern part of the island. Stopping at a
table made of a large slab of wood I looked down towards the sea. A sailing boat
was moving slowly past and behind, slightly in the mist, I discerned the more
remote islands. This was a quiet, peaceful spot inviting me to daydream, as the
name of the island suggests. However, it was actually named after the yacht of
its first developers who bought it in 1930, allegedly for a few pounds. Now only
multi-millionaires would be able to afford it.

I perched on the
table and started to record the impressions of my trip on my tape recorder when
two young women appeared and asked me to take a photo of them. I suggested they
might want to first take off their sunglasses. This they found unnecessary, but
put their arms around each other’s shoulders and, leaning towards the camera,
almost bared their dark skinned breasts.

At
the Southern fringe of the forest I visited an interdenominational chapel. A
simple cross stands on the altar, but behind it an arched window frames the view
of sea, earth and sky, a sight diffused by a flood of light like in an
impressionist painting.

I
ordered coffee and cake at the special bakery of the southern resort. The only
other guests were an elderly couple, fully dressed and enjoying their afternoon
tea under an umbrella. Two youngsters skipped out of the adjacent pool, allowing
it to return to its windless stupor mirroring upside down palm trees. The girl
was wearing a bikini consisting of a few strings, the guy one of these
fashionable swimming trunks that threaten to slip off the bum to cover most of
the thighs.

“Nice to be young,” the elderly woman mentioned, nodding towards the bathers.
“But at seventy we can at least enjoy our tea in the shade of a tree.” She
chuckled.

“You are a poet,” I said.

I
wandered back to the northern part of the island on the board walk and found my
way to the “Lovers’ Cove” which is embedded in the western coast, open to the
afternoon sun. Only guests of the island have access to it, hence its underwater
world is said to be intact. I waded into the water carrying my mask and snorkel,
wearing sandals. The idea of taking my flippers I had abandoned already before
my flight to Australia; they would have been too bulky. Now I didn’t have a
stinger suit either and felt naked without it.

As
soon as I plunged into the water, I realised that the tide was just right for
floating above the coral garden without touching anything, but close enough to
experience shapes and colours more intensely than this had been possible on our
dives. The disadvantage, of course, was that my viewing experience was two-
rather than three-dimensional. The corals were indeed healthy and unharmed and I
enjoyed snorkeling the whole length of the bay.

Exploring the beach afterwards, I spotted one of the adjustable beach-chairs in
a nook, next to rocks and fanning flax and a steep gully clutching ferns and
berry laden bushes. There I sat down to sunbathe and continue talking into my
tape recorder.

Gradually, the sun’s shine took on a reddish golden tinge that would spill all
over land and sea to wilt away in the shadows of the dying day. Two wallabies
hopped down the beach making sure it was vacant. They stopped to take a look at
me, waving their paws as if to warn me it was time for catching the ferry back
to the mainland.